2010–2013: BAWAG CONTEMPORARY
Franz Graf
DERR SCHRECKEN JEDOCH VERMEERTE MEIN INTERESSE
7/7/2011—28/8/2011
Forever Young – there is nobody to whom this applies as much as it does to Franz Graf, provided that idealism and sincerity are the relevant criteria, like in the song by Bob Dylan.
After a major retrospective in the Kunsthalle Krems and hardships like receiving the Austrian Art Prize, the time seems ripe again for some free style. There are not many places in Vienna that would suit the artist’s energies and method better than the transparent, swinging rooms of the BAWAG Contemporary venue. Graf will spontaneously arrange his compositions of pictures, sculptures, photographs, and drawings in the gallery’s ups and downs, along its overwhelming vista, under the tiled ceiling and the glass roof of its inner courtyard. Relying on his system of freely combining, interlinking and overlapping diverse elements, he suspends the boundaries of space and of what a work is usually about. Franz Graf, the botanist, anatomist, and poète maudit, assembles his formats: subtle ink and graphite drawings, photography, white and black canvases, sculpture for which he recycles his inexhaustible hoard of everyday objects. Language. Text as an explanatory motif, as poetry, and open matter. Language that carries content, shrouds content, and, as a graphic element, may be pure form independent of this very content. Gloomy, often apocalyptic installations.
Franz Graf lives in the Waldviertel these days, in that part of the region where scattered farms are grouped within ämter (departments). His living conditions, his friends, and his studios, bursting at the seams, have always impregnated his work: it is the scanty, austere and sparse tenor of the country near Gföhl which rubs itself into the surfaces at the moment. Graf will transfer set pieces of his present environs in the Waldviertel to Vienna. He will, on site, scratch a drawing into a window front painted black for a past exhibition. Franz Graf will also present a group of new works concerned with the continuously recurrent subjects of the body and corporeality. Figuration and ornament are employed for creating an ambivalent, yet probing scenario in a variety of nuances where chance and regularity, order and chaos collide.
Both ambiguous and manifold, Franz Graf’s work never reveals itself at first sight. The coarse unevenness of his craft, of his work, leaves everything open. Unpolished and often unfinished, his work remains promising and boundless.
Curator: Brigitte
Press: Christina Werner
After a major retrospective in the Kunsthalle Krems and hardships like receiving the Austrian Art Prize, the time seems ripe again for some free style. There are not many places in Vienna that would suit the artist’s energies and method better than the transparent, swinging rooms of the BAWAG Contemporary venue. Graf will spontaneously arrange his compositions of pictures, sculptures, photographs, and drawings in the gallery’s ups and downs, along its overwhelming vista, under the tiled ceiling and the glass roof of its inner courtyard. Relying on his system of freely combining, interlinking and overlapping diverse elements, he suspends the boundaries of space and of what a work is usually about. Franz Graf, the botanist, anatomist, and poète maudit, assembles his formats: subtle ink and graphite drawings, photography, white and black canvases, sculpture for which he recycles his inexhaustible hoard of everyday objects. Language. Text as an explanatory motif, as poetry, and open matter. Language that carries content, shrouds content, and, as a graphic element, may be pure form independent of this very content. Gloomy, often apocalyptic installations.
Franz Graf lives in the Waldviertel these days, in that part of the region where scattered farms are grouped within ämter (departments). His living conditions, his friends, and his studios, bursting at the seams, have always impregnated his work: it is the scanty, austere and sparse tenor of the country near Gföhl which rubs itself into the surfaces at the moment. Graf will transfer set pieces of his present environs in the Waldviertel to Vienna. He will, on site, scratch a drawing into a window front painted black for a past exhibition. Franz Graf will also present a group of new works concerned with the continuously recurrent subjects of the body and corporeality. Figuration and ornament are employed for creating an ambivalent, yet probing scenario in a variety of nuances where chance and regularity, order and chaos collide.
Both ambiguous and manifold, Franz Graf’s work never reveals itself at first sight. The coarse unevenness of his craft, of his work, leaves everything open. Unpolished and often unfinished, his work remains promising and boundless.
Curator: Brigitte
Press: Christina Werner